Sufjan Stevens, Deconstructed Into Several Lists

Everything you wanted to know about Sufjan and then some superfluous stuff.

By John Miles, Santa Fe College

Following his 2015 album Carrie and Lowell, Sufjan Stevens further cemented his status as an ever-evolving and all-around brilliant artist.

To pay respects to him, I’ve created a comprehensive guide that’s designed to 1) assist people who are interested in his work but don’t exactly know where to start, and 2) indirectly inspire pure and unchecked rage in the hearts of current Sufjan fans, who are sure to (and should be allowed to) vehemently disagree with certain aspects of these lists. We’ll start with a classic.

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If you’re just trying Sufjan Stevens for the first time, perhaps you feel like it’s all a bit too polished, a bit too perfect or maybe too tight.

While this may indeed be a valid critique, I’d like to introduce to you the third list, which will hopefully act as a sort of counter-argument to the idea that his music is, well, too perfected.

Most people hear soft-spoken indie folk Sufjan, but I’m here to inform you that Sufjan is much more than that. Give one listen to this list, and you’ll see that he’s not exactly a tender, angel-voiced middle-aged man after all; no, in fact he’s far from it: he’s a madman.

One could certainly make the case that a truly great artist, in whatever field(s) of art he fall or she falls into, will never cease to evolve (or at least attempt to evolve) their work.

Stevens defines the word evolve: he evolves his lyric writing, and he constantly evolves as a musician. (Did you know that he co-released a rap album with rappers Son Lux and Serengeti in 2014? And that he played an instrument called the “guitalin”–of which there are only 27 in existence–on his latest album?)

But the craziest part is, these changes always just seem to happen overnight. Sufjan Stevens is operating in an artistic world based on macroevolution. Odds are, he’ll continue to evolve just as rapidly as he has in the past because, well, that’s just what Sufjan does.